I finished Shoshana Zuboff's book
The Age of Survelliance Capitalism a week ago, and while I stand by
my initial thoughts about it, there were some interesting things she brought up in the final few chapters that I wish she had parsed further. This is my main criticism of books like this: too much diagnosis, not enough prescription. As I wrote previously, David Brooks'
recent Atlantic article is a elegantly written piece that better articulates much of what Zuboff is arguing, using social science as the dive point.
That said, here are some additional thoughts I have about both Zuboff and Brooks. Technology (used here to refer the Internet) is embedded in our lives, and short of some wide-scale catastrophe, screens will be part of our lives and our children's lives, and with it, the social media services that form the scaffolding for Internet use. Social media encourages a kind of Narcissus-like fixation on the self that prevents users from both being able to self-differentiate from tribe, but also to see the other side of an issue. By allowing ourselves to be lured into spending much of our lives online, we lose the ability to formulate things for ourselves as our attention spans and capacity for deep thought erode, our vocabulary narrows and with it the range of possible thought, and the small predetermined menu of options given us by the tech industry begins to feel like an inevitability, and indeed, the small parameters of our lives (Zuboff, 467).
Ceding so much power to a handful of tech companies in the form of limitless data collection (the so-called shadow text of any online interaction) means we all live in glass houses with no exit. Aside from being a guaranteed path to madness, it throws aside centuries of hard-won dignity, individual responsibilities and obligations, and the ability to make a life of one's own (Zuboff 185, 469). Zuboff proposes that humans have the right to sanctuary, a place where private life can occur and flourish, where the spirit can fly and be at rest (Zuboff, 5, 477). Such opacity is a basic human dignity, and should be protected against incursions by an increasingly aggressive capitalist mien.
Matthew B. Crawford makes a similar argument when he writes about the attentional commons in The World Beyond Your Head: that the right to occupy public space free from noise and advertising is increasingly available only to those who can afford it. Taking that point a step further in Why We Drive, he notes that the attentional commons has even colonized your car, so that now even your driving experience, formerly one of individual agency and freedom from the relentless demands of commercial life, is peppered with data mining and advertising opportunities, further degrading our attention and increasing distractability (Crawford, Why We Drive, 307-308). "Do we want to make the basic animal freedom of moving your body through space contingent on the competence of large organizations?' (Crawford, Why We Drive, 298, emphasis in original). Moreover, as Zuboff notes, "In this new product regime the simple product functions that we seek are now hopelessly enmeshed in a tangled mixture of software, services, and networks. The very idea of a functional, effective, affordable product or service as a sufficient basis for economic exchange is dying" (237). It's no longer enough to make a useful thing. The thing must be "smart" and provide goods back to its maker in the form of data. Consumers do not want or need "smart" things, but Big Tech's survival depends on convincing large swathes of the population that such things are better than their "dumb" alternatives. Because: advertising and legibility produce huge profits for a handful of powerful people.
The public sphere is now given over to making humanity as legible as possible to both the tech companies and the governments that have climbed in bed with them, gobbling up data about our habits, preferences, private thoughts and letters, political leanings, religious faith, purchases, health history, and much more. When was the last time you were in a public place that did not have a screen in it, or loud music playing? Even if the music is inoffensive, it is still an intrusion into the private space of your mind, and the ability to think deeply without distraction or commercialization.
There is a small restaurant in my neighborhood that is in a converted row house. The dining area is in what was the living room portion of the house, and was formerly cozy and intimate, with small tables, a roaring fire, and dark wood. The food was a bit pricey, but very good and fresh. It felt like a quintessential English pub. A few years ago, the owners decided to install three 60" television screens in the 200 square foot dining room, making it difficult to maintain eye contact with a dining companion and conversation of any sort impossible. (I don't care how intentional you are about resisting screen distraction, when three 60" televisions are on and blaring in a 200 square foot room, you cannot ignore them). The best one can do in this new and "improved" space is to hope that whatever is on the screen something inoffensive like a ball game and your food comes quickly so you can get the meal over with. It does not inspire me to eat there. Even outdoor spaces have been colonized for advertising and data collection, as cities install sidewalk chargers for mobile devices that also hoover up any data in the vicinity.
Zuboff points out many other troubling aspects of social media and Big Data, including the ability of Facebook or Google to quietly engineer elections or subvert democratic process, without people ever being aware of such machinations (298-303). It turns out that democracy is an existential threat to the economic model of Big Tech. The big firms of Silicon Valley are not regulated by or overseen by the government but have enormous power over how things actually work out legally and otherwise in society, all done beneath a shroud of secrecy. Ironic really. Silicon Valley puts everyone in a glass cage, but expects to be able to live in peace and quiet in an iron fortress with no more than a "trust me" assurance that no stones will be lobbed our way. "The commodification of behavior under the conditions of surveillance capitalism pivots us toward a societal future in which an exclusive division of learning is protected by secrecy, indecipherability, and expertise....These markets do not depend upon you except first as a source of raw material from which surplus is derived, and then as a target for guaranteed outcomes" (Zuboff, 327).
Living in a glass house is psychologically paralyzing. Everyone has the right to have secrets and anonymity, or at least they should. We need places of refuge, places of quiet sanctuary to keep ourselves together and grow strong and resilient. "Those who would eviscerate sanctuary are keen to take the offensive, putting us off guard with the guilt-inducing question "What have you got to hide?" But as we have seen, the crucial developmental challenges of the self-other balance cannot be negotiated adequately without the sanctity of 'disconnected' time and space for the ripening of inward awareness and the possibility of reflexivity: reflection on and by oneself. The real psychological truth is this: If you've got nothing to hide, you are nothing" (Zuboff, 479, emphasis in the original).
We need opacity for the sake of our souls, and true human flourishing is found in the protection of private spaces for the individual and family. The health of our minds and bodies rests in qualities of "contemplation, autonomy, rejuvenation, confiding, freedom, creativity, recovery, catharsis, and concealment. These are experiences without which we can neither flourish nor usefully contribute to our families, communities, and society" (Zuboff, 479). Life involves a great deal of uncertainty and insecurity, and we stand to lose a good deal if we blindly hand over our privacy in pursuit of safety and security. There is mystery in the unknown, deep intimate knowledge that can only be gained in an unrestrained milieu.
Unfortunately, as a societal measure, individual privacy entails a great deal of social trust, which is in great decay in the present time. David Brooks notes the many ways we do not trust each other or our institutions, and how much that has changed in the last 50 years or so. It is also true that the decay of trust is somewhat cyclical in societies, and share common features. Brooks writes: "People feel disgusted by the state of society. Trust in institutions plummets. Moral indignation is widespread. Contempt for established power is intense. A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. These are moments of agitation, excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion" (Brooks, The Atlantic, October 5, 2020, hereafter Brooks, Oct 2020). While Brooks does not explicitly say so, I would also argue that these moments follow what Yuri Slezkine details as apocalyptic millenarianism, in which a disenfranchised minority group seizes control of power and culture to try to achieve a utopia, usually through violent means.
The current drive to utopia is in reaction to the individualism and liberation of the Baby Boomer generation, whose drive to pursue their own happiness placed much of society in a precarious and insecure position. Boomers had the benefit of an older generation that provided foundation security, but that foundation is now long gone. Families are rarely intact these days, and the economy is a disaster of unfettered raw capitalism, undigested through the laws of democracy. Many younger people have been excluded from financial and personal security, and now seek it in any form possible, even if that means social credit systems, government and Big Data surveillance, and the general loss of privacy as a norm and right.
Writes Brooks,
"Their worldview is predicated on threat, not safety. Thus the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice" (Brooks, Oct 2020).
Attachment theory says that several dichotomies or dyads exist within all of us, that either bind or alienate us from our circumstances. Either we feel safe or at risk, lost or at home, broken or whole. Capitalism is heavily invested in making our attachments insecure--feeling unsafe, lost, and broken--so that we will be more likely to buy the products and services that promise to alleviate those feelings, or at the least, surrender our data so that we can be aggressively marketed to about our attachments.
Social trust is part of the larger picture of attachment, and the collective experience of the past 40 years or so has betrayed trust again and again, as institutional leaders are shown to be morally or financially corrupt (or both), institutions seek to shore up corrupt leaders rather than root it out, and the economic system fails to serve a large percentage of people. The reason why institutional health is important is that institutions are supposed provide the basis for personal formation as well as a place to belong. Instead they become performative and sterile, unable to do any of the hard work of transformation. "The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves" (Brooks, Oct 2020). And that's at the macro level.
On a personal level, our close social interactions are fraught with instability and moral liquidity. "The evidence suggests that trust is an imprint left by experience, not a distorted perception" (Brooks, Oct 2020). The instability of the economy means shallow roots in physical communities, as people pull up stakes to go where the jobs are, rather than staying close to family and friends who provide the thick bonds of social trust. While we don't need to be intimately attached to society at large, we do need to be securely attached to one another to flourish, and when we attach securely to one another, that thriving ripples out into larger society. This bonds are frayed and worn, notes Brooks. "In the age of disappointment, our sense of safety went away. Some of this is physical insecurity: school shootings, terrorist attacks, police brutality, and overprotective parenting at home that leaves young people incapable of handling real-world stress [or conversely, absentee parents who leave children to fend for themselves]" (Brooks, Oct 2020).
In short, we live in a time of chaotic instability and distrust, where finding a secure place to belong and flourish is increasingly rare. When we cannot trust those around us, we try to make ourselves invulnerable, impermeable to the hurts and disappointments that could be shared in trustworthy relationships. We look for external ways to measure trustworthiness, and Big Tech is all too happy to oblige, for the price of your private self in the form of data mining. True intimacy declines in the face of such external measurements (Zuboff, 206-207), and is replaced by entertainment and abstraction. We seek security in rigidity, ideology, and tribe (Brooks, Oct 2020). It follows that we are in the midst of a grave existential crisis. The job of culture is to respond to common problems, but when the problems change, the common response must shift as well, which is almost always fraught.
"The cultural shifts we are witnessing offer more safety to the individual at the cost of clannishness within society. People are embedded more in communities and groups, but in an age of distrust, groups look at each other warily, angrily, viciously. The shift toward a more communal viewpoint is potentially a wonderful thing, but it leads to cold civil war unless there is a renaissance of trust. There's no avoiding the core problem. Unless we can find a way to rebuild trust, the nation does not function" (Brooks, Oct 2020).
So how do we rebuild trust and provide refuge for ourselves and others? Mostly in the small invisible ways that will not show up on a news feed, or help us economically or socially climb a ladder of success. It is in cultivating virtues of reliability and dependability in ourselves. Providing a soft place to land for those we love. In challenging ourselves to make promises--being open and vulnerable in a radical way-- and hold fast to those promises, we extend a fragile branch of trust to others around us. If they are able to return it to us, then trust builds. Trust breeds truth, and vice versa. So the path to trust is a long one, and will not happen overnight.
Vulnerability in relationships is hard, because we don't want to be hurt, particularly if we have been hurt badly in the past. But I think we humans hunger for vulnerability. I see it in the stories we tell ourselves--the books that are lodestones of culture. We want to be in intimate relationships, but not all of us know how to achieve that sort of radical vulnerability. It means handing the inner most parts of yourself over to someone else and trusting that they will hold them and not use them as a weapon against you. It means having faith that the people you love and trust can hold not just the air-brushed public self, but the flawed inner self--your worst self on your worst day. We can't begin to trust people with our worst selves if we are forced to live in glass houses with no exit.
We need places of sanctuary--places free from prying eyes and listening ears and glowing screens. It is not enough to pursue invisibility within the glass house. We need fortresses of refuge, behind thick solid walls, curtained windows, and manned defenses. Keep secrets--yours and others. Get to know the landscape of your place in the world through real, lived experience. The future is likely to be digital in many ways. That does not mean we have to sacrifice our humanity on the altar of inevitability or cede our private lives to the glass-housed public square.
Build a fortress, and guard it with your life, even if only in your mind.
Sources:
Brooks, David. "Collapsing Levels of Trust are Devastating America," The Atlantic, October 5, 2020.
Crawford, Matthew B. Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. New York: HarperCollins, 2020.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs, 2019.
